1. Field of the Invention
Apparatuses consistent with what is disclosed herein relate to estimating movement of a vehicle using stereo image matching, and more particularly, to an apparatus for estimating movement of a vehicle using stereo matching by dividing stereo image information into ground, background and object labels, and measuring rotational and movement information of the vehicle using the ground label and the background label.
2. Description of the Related Art
‘Smart car’ is now one of the important keywords that are considered in the industries including not only automobile industry but also IT industry. This is due to need for safe driving, by way of analyzing scene on the road to provide additional information to a driver and inform a certain event at appropriate and accurate timing.
A camera or a range sensor is installed on an automobile to detect an approaching obstacle or to widen visual field of the driver. Among such sensors, a stereo vision sensor is a representative passive range sensor. The sensor is particularly advantageous because it can produce 2.5 dimensional range data and images at the same time. The resultant range data or disparity map can be used as input information for operations such as detecting obstacles or planning route of travel.
The currently-available stereo matching algorithm is based on the presumption that zero-disparity plane is in parallel to one of the image planes. However, such presumption cannot be effective particularly when acquiring disparity with respect to plane that is not so parallel with the image plane. Referring to FIG. 1, the related art stereo matching algorithm based on distant reference plane suffers shortcoming that it is only able to perform disparity matching with respect to object within a narrow distance range and that it does not operate with respect to object after disparity.
Further, in order to measure movement of a moving vehicle, it is conventionally necessary to utilize the location information such as GPS or utilize sensing equipment equipped in the vehicle such as steering angle sensor.